The present invention relates to mechanisms for facilitating transactions in electronic commerce. More specifically, the present invention relates to checking compatibility between operations, protocols and instruments involved in electronic commerce operations.
The advent of computer networks, such as the Internet and the rise of the World Wide Web have led to an explosion in the development of applications, such as websites, that facilitate rapid dissemination of information. Using the World Wide Web, it is presently possible to instantaneously access information on the weather in Africa or stock prices in Tokyo with a only a few clicks of a computer mouse. As the Internet continues to evolve, it no longer merely functions as a mechanism for dissemination of information; it is also becoming an infrastructure that supports electronic commerce. The Internet is now commonly used to sell items such as books, software and compact discs.
An electronic commerce transaction, such as a sale, is typically accomplished by allowing a user on a client computer system to remotely browse through a web site on a server computer system in order to select an item to purchase. Once the item is selected, the user purchases the item by entering a credit card number into a form, and sending the form to the website.
People are now beginning to develop more sophisticated mechanisms to facilitate electronic commerce. Financial instruments, such as credit cards, debit cards and cash, are presently being cast into electronic form. For example, instead of entering a credit card number into a form, a purchaser will be able to select an icon representing a credit card or, alternatively, an icon representing electronic cash. These recent developments have given rise to a large number of different protocols, which are currently being developed and used to support electronic commerce transactions. For example, an electronic transaction might make use of the Secure Electronic Transactions (SET) protocol, the Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) protocol, the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, or the Mondex protocol. A user desiring to perform transactions with different entities that make use of these different protocols must presently provide a different version of a financial instrument, such as a credit card, for each different protocol. Additionally, as new protocols come into existence, a user must modify existing instruments or produce new instruments to make use of the new protocols. Providing many different versions of a financial instrument for different protocols is burdensome and greatly complicates electronic commerce transactions.